The present invention relates to a treating method ideal for preserving freshness of carcasses in a processing line of carcass, an apparatus used for the treatment, tempered meat treated by the method, and a storage for the tempered meat, more concretively, to a method and apparatus for tempering treatment of meat, tempered meat treated by the tempering method, and a refrigerator storage for storing the meat treated by the tempering method.
Conventionally, in a carcass treating line, processing advances in the sequence of slaughtering cattle, blood letting, cutting off legs and horns, pretreatment, skin scraping, washing, breast cutting open, head cutting off, evisceration, back cutting, carcass inspection, dressing, and sterilizing and washing.
The carcass sterilized and washed in the last step is transferred to a refrigerator for storage, where the carcass is stored for a length of time until it is supplied for human consumption.
Temperature of the sterilized and washed carcass rises due to the activity of enzymes inside the meat. Therefore, there arises a need to lower the temperature (i.e. to perform tempering treatment) before the carcass is transferred to the refrigerator for storage. However, in the past, only such a treatment has been performed that air at ordinary temperature is blown on to the carcass as shown in FIG. 8 or the carcass is stored in a refrigerator of inside air temperature of about 15° C. for interim storage, and there has been a problem that the temperature of the carcass lowers slowly and the carcass loses freshness. FIG. 8 shows the inside of a tempering treatment room for performing tempering treatment of pig carcasses, and in the drawing, reference numeral 4 is a cooler for producing air at ordinary temperature, 7 are pig carcasses, 8 are gambrels for suspending the pig carcasses, 9 is a transfer rail for transferring the pig carcasses.
With the method and apparatus disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2001-61403, cool air is directly blown on to the surface of the carcass at high speed, so, occurrence of high temperature of the carcass (high temperature of such a degree that adhesion of microbes to the carcass is not sufficiently suppressed) can be eliminated and moisture on the surface thereof can be removed rapidly. However, as the elimination of occurrence of the high temperature is performed by utilizing sensible heat of the water in the carcass, temperature of the carcass does not lower sufficiently, and in addition, adhesion of microbes to the surface of the carcass due to adhesion of moisture to the surface can not be suppressed sufficiently.